Here's an interesting one.
If you create a FreeBSD 10 ZFS system that boots from a USB drive, you may hang if you don't have a USB keyboard.
I've noticed this on a few different hardware systems, and it may even be present in FreeBSD 9.x - I haven't had much chance to look into it.
The hangs are always the same ; The zfs boot loader can't find a bootable disk.
When I manually type in zfs:rpool (in the case of the manual ZFS on root setup here) or zfs:zroot/ROOT/default (in the case of the new FreeBSD10 ZFS installer) I'll get one of two things;
1) kernel panic and crash. Note that this is often from pressing 'return' at the boot loader prompt, but typing 'zfs:rpool' won't cause an issue.
2) a small move forward to set the host UUID and hostid, then nothing - just hung.
It looks like when the USB keyboard is not present, then da0 (my USB Flash Stick) doesn't exist.
At some point I'll look into this further, as you shouldn't need any keyboard (USB or other) connected to boot FreeBSD, but for now just make sure you have a USB keyboard hooked up for boot.
Additionally, the order of the USB devices seems to be important. If I have a USB Keyboard on my USB0 Root, and the boot device on my USB1 Root, then I have this symptom as well. If I boot with the boot device on USB0, and keyboard on USB1, then I'm okay.
If you create a FreeBSD 10 ZFS system that boots from a USB drive, you may hang if you don't have a USB keyboard.
I've noticed this on a few different hardware systems, and it may even be present in FreeBSD 9.x - I haven't had much chance to look into it.
The hangs are always the same ; The zfs boot loader can't find a bootable disk.
When I manually type in zfs:rpool (in the case of the manual ZFS on root setup here) or zfs:zroot/ROOT/default (in the case of the new FreeBSD10 ZFS installer) I'll get one of two things;
1) kernel panic and crash. Note that this is often from pressing 'return' at the boot loader prompt, but typing 'zfs:rpool' won't cause an issue.
2) a small move forward to set the host UUID and hostid, then nothing - just hung.
It looks like when the USB keyboard is not present, then da0 (my USB Flash Stick) doesn't exist.
At some point I'll look into this further, as you shouldn't need any keyboard (USB or other) connected to boot FreeBSD, but for now just make sure you have a USB keyboard hooked up for boot.
Additionally, the order of the USB devices seems to be important. If I have a USB Keyboard on my USB0 Root, and the boot device on my USB1 Root, then I have this symptom as well. If I boot with the boot device on USB0, and keyboard on USB1, then I'm okay.
